Take Two Told To Take A Hike In Its Attempt To Get Bioshock.com

from the late-to-the-game dept

It often seems like big companies tend to win domain dispute rulings over companies that just squat on various domains -- and perhaps that makes sense. So it's a bit of a surprise to find out that Take-Two Interactive has lost its bid to get the domain name bioshock.com, which is currently held by a company that owns hundreds of thousands of domains, Name Administration. The problem? The domain was registered a year before Take-Two filed to register a trademark over Bioshock, for the video game series. Name Administration noted, in its defense, that "bioshock" is not a term that's exclusive to Take-Two, and the arbitration board found no evidence of "bad faith" in using the name.

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It's unethical, not illegal. The same exact thing happens in real life all the time. People buy up large areas of land cheap, do nothing with it, and sell it off at inflated prices when someone else wants to develop there. In a stretch, the stock market could be said to be the same thing. People buy up stocks cheap and sell at an inflated price when others want it.

Ugh

At the dawn of the web, what is now called "squatting" was only one of very few ways a smaller entity could "make it" over a larger, richer entity... simply by beating them to the punch. It was almost like the early web's form of a "gold rush." A few people made some money by selling their "claims." Then the Lawyers arrived with lots of cash for the Judges re-election campaigns.

""squatting" was only one of very few ways a smaller entity could "make it" over a larger, richer entity."

Only if you were an immoral opportunist. Other people managed to "make it" by coming up with new or well-implemented ideas and building a company up from that (Yahoo, IMDB, Google, eBay, Amazon, etc.).

If the only way you could make money was by buying a domain name for a well-known company's trademark and waiting for them to pay a ransom, you didn't deserve the money.

Its a jerk move

But unfortunately it looks like Take Two will just have to go with bioshockgame.com or something like that. Although I do wonder what exactly is at bioshock.com (I'm at work and the site is blocked). Chances are Name Administration is/was probably hoping to get some ransom money out from Take Two (they may not have known about the game but what other reason could they have for owning hundreds of thousands of domain names). Take Two should just cut its losses and get another name.